Why Literary Time is Measured in Minutes

Seventeen years ago, in an essay titled "Formalism and Time," Catherine Gallagher argued that critics are bad at understanding narrative form as something that takes time.¹ Instead we try to convert narrative into a timeless structure, or condense stories into a few scenes that convey the meaning of the whole. Whether it's Jane Eyre walking back and forth on the third story of Thornfield, or Gabriel Conroy watching the snow fall outside his window, we understand fiction by identifying moments of heightened significance. These could be epiphanies or anticlimaxes. In Gallagher's view the value of these scenes depends less on their specific content than on their rhetorical function, which is to reconcile time with timelessness. She sees critical tradition as deeply shaped by Walter Pater's dream of cheating death by embracing ephemerality in the form of a single "hard gem-like" moment that, paradoxically, becomes eternal.² A moving aspiration, but also, according to Gallagher, a way of undervaluing the dailiness of life, and long Victorian novels.

This would be an interesting argument under any circumstances, but it's a particularly remarkable thing for Gallagher to have written in the year 2000, when she was also collaborating with Stephen Greenblatt on a theoretical defense of New Historicism. After all, the New Historicist critic does for historical time exactly what Gallagher's Paterian critic does for narrative—that is, condense it into a brief scene (an anecdote) that crystallizes the meaning latent in a larger mass of events. This mode of condensation didn't flourish in New Historicism by happenstance. Gallagher and Greenblatt explicitly theorize the "effect of compression" as an appropriately literary approach to history.³ The anecdote becomes for historical narrative what the detail is for literary realism, conveying Erich Auerbach's "confidence that in any random fragment plucked from the course of a life at any time the totality of its fate is contained and can be portrayed."⁴ While Gallagher's essay diagnoses temporal condensation as an attempt to evade mortality, her coauthored book presents it as a necessary principle of historical understanding, producing "a touch of the real" that disrupts the "generalizable typicality" of the "Big Stories" told by Marxist or Annaliste historians.⁵

I don't mean to criticize Gallagher for exploring both sides of this issue. Temporal condensation is a rhetorical move, not a policy proposal: it may be less important to reach a stable judgment about it than to understand its centrality to literary criticism. This centrality has not been expressed only through New Historical anecdotes and Auerbachian fragments. Literary scholars' titles are often similarly organized by an implicit tableau: The Madwoman in the Attic, "The Halted Traveler," Learning to Curse.⁶ All of these phrases evoke a brief episode from which we can unfold a larger structure of feeling. That leap across scales of time—connecting collective history to a moment of individual experience, and lending immediacy to the past—is one of the distinctive strengths of literary criticism.⁷

However, the assumptions underlying this gesture are far from self-evident. Why are short spans of time so central to our discipline? Novels commonly cover twenty or thirty years. In some subgenres (science fiction, James Michener's epics) it is not unusual to range across centuries. Why is experience measured in seconds or minutes more appropriately literary than experience measured in weeks or months?

The question becomes urgent for me because much of my own literary research explores long timelines. This is a self-interested choice, not a normative stance. I don't believe that large scales of analysis are more important than resonant details. I just find that, in practice, century-spanning questions tend to be worth investigating, because literary scholars have often left questions on that scale unexplored, or at least unresolved. But these questions have been left unresolved, of course, because they don't fit our discipline's rhetorical templates. Where large historical questions could be condensed into a single case study, someone else has often already done it. The live opportunities I discover tend to be located in aspects of history that...